Staff Data Engineer

We are Vandebron

Our journey began in 2014 with Chapter 1 of the energy transition, in which we set out to disrupt the market and increase transparency by connecting consumers directly with local green energy producers.

Now, in Chapter 2, we are fully committed to making 100% green energy available, 100% of the time. Think smart solutions: flexible utilisation of wind and solar farms, smart charging for electric vehicles, and efficient energy storage. We don't sit around and wait; we actively drive a sustainable future with a healthy touch of rebellion.

Green energy, smart solutions - that is Vandebron.

Where you'll land

We are developing a modern open data lakehouse, and we’ve already laid real groundwork on its strategy and architecture. We are looking for a senior engineer at Staff level, our most senior individual contributor grade, to bring additional depth and experience to that effort. As Staff Data Engineer, you work across the whole data platform: the lakehouse, the warehouse, ingestion, orchestration, ML/AI Ops and the engineering standards everything downstream depends on. You work shoulder to shoulder with the data engineers, as their most experienced peer and mentor.

Your weight comes from depth, judgement and the trust you earn. You partner with other (data) engineers on technical direction, strengthen the critical paths together, and raise the bar for everyone who builds on the platform. You work alongside our data and intelligence leader as their technical peer. They lead the analytics and intelligence teams; you help steward the platform those teams build on.

What 'Staff' means here: you take on the platform problems of the highest scope and complexity, make foundational improvements, and support the other engineers through technical direction and mentorship. It is a depth-and-influence level. 

We are mid-migration to a new CRM as our energy operations backbone. This role does not run that migration, but it owns how the data lands on the platform and becomes usable for customer intelligence, so the migration, from the start, shapes the work.

What you’ll do

• Shape the lakehouse architecture with the team, such as table formats, catalogues, storage layout and engine integration and turn those decisions into clear ADRs everyone can build on.

• Architect and implement a shift-left data governance strategy,  working with upstream data producers to establish data contracts, SLOs, and code-enforced quality gates that catch issues before production.

• Serve as the primary technical peer and trusted advisor to Data & Intelligence leadership, helping translate long-term business strategy into a robust data platform roadmap.

• Work with the (data) engineers day-to-day by sharing context, reviewing each other's work, and mentoring where your experience helps.

• Establish and scale the MLOps & AIOps capabilities of our platform, defining standard engineering patterns for feature stores, model registries, LLM/generative AI data orchestration and agent frameworks.

• Work closely with Product & Platform engineering, with a clear boundary: they drive the composable MACH backend behind our headless customer-facing products; you drive the data platform that feeds intelligence to those experiences and our customer needs.